


Intergalactic

by ElleWinter



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Beastie Boys, F/M, Suggestive Themes, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-18
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-09-06 22:15:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20298796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElleWinter/pseuds/ElleWinter
Summary: Anne Hardesty and Jim Kirk argue about music, flirt, and somehow end up discussing time travel. My take on how the Beastie Boys can reference Star Trek in their songs, but also exist in the Star Trek universe.A Walking Wounded side story.Complete.





	Intergalactic

Anne shifted to sit against the headboard and tucked her feet under her, smiling a little as she watched Jim sift through music on one of the powerwalls. They were still ‘arguing’ about late 20th century/early 21st century pop music-- a topic that had grown to be contentious and usually ended in pretend make-up sex. Anne’s taste ran to either classical rock, obscure rockabilly, punk, loud angry music in general or bubblegum-sweet ridiculous bullshit that was made specifically to appeal to the masses. Jim was more than all right with the first few, but he hated the last with a fiery passion because it got stuck in his head, and he’d be wandering the apartment singing the words to ‘Whenever, Wherever’ under his breath until Anne called him on it, at which point he’d get cranky and put on some classical rock like Jimi Hendrix’s cover of All Along the Watchtower.**  
**

“Look, Bad Romance is a masterfully crafted pop song. Even you have to admit that,” Anne said, pretty specifically to piss him off. She was right and he knew it, but she’d caught him humming the tune a few hours ago and he was still mad about it.

Jim snorted. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, flipping through the conveniently placed powerwall to find something he wanted to listen to. “Forget it. It’s mass-produced crap that’s meant to specifically to be catchy--”

“But that’s what makes it so great,” Anne said. “Come on, it's drenched in Hitchcock references, even the chord progression in the chorus is a Hitchcock reference, and it still topped charts everywhere. It’s way more cerebral than you think. And it’s catchy, she took some risks with it--”

“It’s overproduced, it’s-- we’re not having this discussion again. You want masterfully crafted? Here.” He flipped a song on. “God, I haven’t heard this one in ages. Everyone always plays Sabotage.”

[[MORE]]

The robotic voice started up, then the bass hit with a nice little rumble. This apartment had a gorgeous audio setup. “Oh, beautiful. And yes, this one’s about as close to perfection as you can get, especially with all those rough edges.” Anne grinned. “But sometimes you just want something really _slick_.”

Jim looked over his shoulder at her, raising an eyebrow, a little grin playing at the corners of his mouth. “Anne Madeline Hardesty, I think you know I get all the _slick_ I can handle with you around.”

“Ooh, very nice,” Anne laughed. He wasn’t serious. Neither was she. Yet. They’d just gotten out of the shower, and it was probably time for food before they let themselves get carried away again. “That was a really excellent turnaround, James Tiberius Kirk. Almost as good as watching you turn around.”

He laughed, flipping the covers back and getting into bed beside her, leaning against the headboard. “Okay, it makes sense for me to like asses, but you’ve got no excuse. What’s up with that?”

Anne felt her need for food starting to wane while her other needs waxed. “Well, let’s put it this way, James Tiberius: Old West riders had spurs; I've got nails instead.”

The look in his eye suddenly got more serious, his gaze flicking over her loose hair and bared breasts with growing want. “Hmm. That’s a comparison worth testing, I think. How about it? Wanna go for a ride?” He grinned widely and waggled his eyebrows, extremely pleased with his terrible innuendo.

“I can’t believe you get me to fuck you with shitty lines like that,” Anne snickered.

“Works every time. So far, anyway. I guess you just like shitty pickup lines,” Jim laughed, draping an arm over her shoulders and pulling her close.

“I swear, I’m going to write a tell-all book and include every single one of those lines in it, and you’ll never get laid again,” Anne said, her body already starting to react, her nipples tightening into little pink points. She rested her head on his chest, her hand sliding down his thigh, not quite touching the inside of it.

“Great idea. If you list all your favorite songs in it, you can call it ‘I Have Bad Taste in Everything, Including Men.’”

Anne sighed heavily. “Jim…” There was no way to answer that, so Anne just reached up, grabbing the back of his neck and pulling him into a kiss. The downturn into sexual territory was sharp and sudden, with her fingernails already digging in lightly and his free hand seizing one of her breasts, plucking gently at the nipple.

It would have gone on, too, and probably would have been quite satisfying if Anne hadn’t caught one of the last lines of the song and froze. She couldn’t be right.

Jim was immediately pulling away. “You okay?” he asked, worried, his hand having moved to her shoulder.

“Yeah, I’m all right,” Anne said, glancing around for a padd within reach. There were none.

“Music pause,” Jim said, correctly interpreting why she wanted the padd. “What’s up, gorgeous? Something wrong?”

“I don’t know,” Anne said. “Music repeat last fifteen seconds. Twenty seconds.” As the music started, “Jim, listen to this and just tell me I’m not insane, okay?”

He listened with her, concerned, and heard the line. She knew he did, because his eyebrows rose. “Huh. That’s a hell of a coincidence.”

“That’s crazy. That’s not even coincidence anymore. Here, grab me a padd and I’ll see if I can find out what that’s all about. Come on now-- Spock pinching necks? That’s too weird to be coincidence.” Anne took the padd he offered her and started to tap away, pulling up all the associations she could from that song. Fortunately, the song had been thoroughly analyzed… but what Anne found was even more unsettling. “It says here that Spock was a sort of folklore figure who showed up in San Francisco in the 1980’s. Apparently he claimed he could telepathically talk to whales, and the neck pinch comes from an incident where he shut down a punk kid on a bus who was listening to his music too loud and bothering everyone. He pinched the punk’s neck, and the kid passed out.” Anne looked over at Jim. “It says here he had a companion that he called Admiral Kirk.”

Jim paused at that, frowning, his entire body still. “Well, it could still be a coincidence,” he started.

“Bullshit,” Anne said immediately. She didn’t like to talk about his work much, but… “Jim, I get that there are things you can’t talk about, but can you at least tell me whether you know anything about this?”

Jim was silent for a while, frowning down at the padd in her hands. “Well… not really. Maybe. It’s--”

“It’s a long story?” Anne asked. On impulse, she told the padd to cross-reference all the Beastie Boys lyrics with terms that would only be found in post-warp literature. “Jim.” She showed him the padd. “Klingons. Look, this can’t be a coincidence. I can’t write this off.” She paused. “You know I won’t tell anyone… but I need this explained. How are these things showing up in lyrics by one of your favorite bands?”

Shaking his head slowly, Jim glanced up at her, then back down at the padd. “That’s the thing. I _can’t_ explain it.” He hesitated, looking back at her, searching her face, then seemed to make a decision. “But I can guess.”

“I’m listening,” Anne said quietly.

It took him a moment to organize his thoughts. “I can’t go into too much detail on this, but we’ve had proof that time isn’t… isn’t as solid as we think it is. There are at least two timelines that we’re certain exist side-by-side. Maybe more.”

“How do you know this?” Anne asked, fascinated. “What was the proof? Can you tell me?”

Jim sighed, settling her against him and leaning back on the pillows. “The proof was Spock, actually. Another Spock. He’s-- he died shortly before the Altamid incident. Old age. He was a hundred and sixty two years old.”

Anne couldn’t muster up an intelligent reply. “What the fuck,” she breathed. “And you’re sure? Genetics testing--”

“Absolutely sure. Hell, I mind melded with him, before Spock and I were even friends. He was Spock. No doubt about it.” Jim looked down at her. “You know you can’t tell _anyone_, right? Some of this is classified. If anyone ever finds out you know… well, it wouldn’t be pretty.”

Meeting his eyes squarely, Anne said, “If there’s one thing I know, Jim Kirk, it’s how to keep a secret.”

He knew that. Even if he didn’t know the reasons she said it-- especially because he didn’t know the reasons she said it. He just nodded and continued. “All right. Well, what happened was pretty complicated, but what it boils down to is that there was a split in the timeline the day I was born. In the other timeline, my dad never died because the Narada never came back in time to kill him. And I can’t really get into all of the factors here, but because of some weird time shit, all of reality changed. Some changes were big. Some of them weren’t. But the upshot, at least in how it applies to the song, is that either the other Kirk and Spock did it, or it was me and I haven’t done it yet.” He laughed, looking pensive, shaking his head. “I told you my life gets really weird sometimes.”

“Huh.” It sort of changed her perspective on him. “So… that other you, he knows about you?”

“I don’t know. Never met him. I don’t think he does, because I don’t think the other Spock ever managed to go back. I get the impression that… that once Vulcan was destroyed, he felt like he was needed here.” Jim gave her a humorless grin. “Vulcan was never destroyed in the other timeline.”

That gave Anne pause. A universe where Vulcan still existed, where Jim had grown up with a father who cared about him… “Sounds like a better place,” she said wistfully. “Maybe I wouldn’t have been-- wasn’t-- taken in that timeline.” She laughed, her voice soft and a bit rough. “Or maybe I didn’t even exist. Who knows?”

“I don’t know. I got the impression that the other me didn’t have many attachments aside from his crew,” Jim said, his voice almost apologetic. 

“Maybe we never met,” Anne said, turning the possibility over in her mind.

Frowning, Jim shook his head. “Maybe we just met under better circumstances.”

Anne laughed. “Oh, then we definitely wouldn’t have ended up like this. That would have been a wham bam thank you ma’am situation on both our parts, assuming the broad strokes of personality are the same.”

Jim’s frown only deepened. “No, I don’t think so. I mean, it’d be pretty in character for that guy to have a fling, but I don’t think he’d just fuck off after a couple days or whatever. That would be pretty stupid.”

“Oh come on. Nothing’s set in stone. If you and I didn’t have a reason not to fuck, we’d have gotten it out of our systems and then gotten scared and run off,” Anne teased, wondering why he looked so balky.

“That’s dumb,” Jim said, his frown turning into an actual scowl. “I guess it’s a possibility, but he’d have to be kind of a coward--”

“James Tiberius Kirk,” Anne said slowly, her eyes widening, and had to stop herself from laughing again. “You’re mad at him.”

He immediately started to backpedal. “What? No, I’m just-- well, come on, if he couldn’t figure out--”

“Yes you are,” Anne marveled. “You’re mad at him because he might not have stuck around to do--” she flapped a hand around at the bedroom and its luxurious appointments, “--all this.” They both knew she didn’t really mean the bedroom.

“I’m not _mad_ at him--” Jim started, his frown reappearing, then his shoulders sank and he sighed. “Okay, maybe a little. But he would have to be really stupid to have the possibility of something like this and just let it go without ever… I mean, even with all your rotten music it’s still pretty damn great.”

Anne watched him without speaking for a few moments, just… just appreciating him, blue eyes, messy hair and all. If he wasn’t himself, she wouldn’t have fallen so hard for him, and that other Kirk definitely wasn’t her Jim. “This makes me right again, you know,” she said, a little irony in her smile. “Reality had to bend for you to exist, mon étoile.”

He just laughed once or twice, looking away, like he wasn’t really sure how to react to that. “Given all the shit that’s happened, I can’t exactly be glad that we’re in this timeline here.”

“I can, and I will,” Anne said lightly. She knew he was feeling a little guilty, as if his happiness in this moment was the only thing on the other side of the scales from all the havoc the Narada had wreaked. “If some other me exists in that timeline, she’s enjoying what _she_ has, whatever that is. Why should she be the only one? Why shouldn’t I enjoy what I have?”  
  


“What you have, huh?” he asked, looking skeptically at her, trying to suppress the tiny smile that wanted to touch the corners of his mouth. He wanted to be convinced that it was all right not to be guilty over it. Good, because it was. No one needed him to self-flagellate. “And what’s that?”  


Inspiration struck, and Anne deliberately looked down, then up at him from under her lowered lashes. “Someone awful enough to love my shitty music _and_ my shitty pickup lines.”

Bemusement replaced his skepticism, and that smile made a tentative appearance, uncertain of its welcome. “Is that so?” he asked, not really sure what she was driving at; she hadn’t been the one with the shitty lines.

“Jim Kirk…” Set ‘em up, and knock ‘em down. Anne smiled invitingly at him. “...come and rock the sure shot.”

He knew the lyric immediately, and that grin widened, became sunny and uncomplicated and boyish in the wake of her easy delivery. His arm slid back around her, yanking her into his lap, his other hand tipping up her jaw. As if she needed the cue. Anne was already curling up against him, wanting to feel that smile on her lips, glad she’d driven away that guilty look. After some time and a few kisses, once their breathing had started to roughen and pulses were getting quick, Jim laughed and said, “She’s the cheese, and I’m the macaroni.”

“No fair, you had time to think about it,” Anne pretended to protest. “Mine was really good, I did that really well--” Both laughter and another kiss cut her off, and like music and pickup lines, it didn’t matter whose were whose. Either way worked just fine for both of them.


End file.
